


kaddish

by achillese



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Freeform, Jewpernatural, Judaism, Jupernatural, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-26
Updated: 2021-02-26
Packaged: 2021-03-17 00:34:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,285
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29708937
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/achillese/pseuds/achillese
Summary: Adam is in first grade when his mother signs him up for Hebrew school.
Relationships: Michael/Adam Milligan
Comments: 24
Kudos: 59





	kaddish

**Author's Note:**

> Is it a cliché to name a relatively emotional fic after the Mourner’s Kaddish? Yep. Do I care? Nope.

Adam is in first grade when his mother signs him up for Hebrew school. 

It doesn’t go over well – he’s a child and all he wants to do with his free time is play outside with his friends and watch TV – but Kate is insistent. Her grandfather Eliezer came to this country and tossed the guttural, gravelly consonants of ‘Milechmann’ into the Hudson River under the shadow of Lady Liberty herself, and so Kate is determined to see Adam through to his bar mitzvah, even if she has to drag him kicking and screaming. 

_It’s only once a week, and it’s important. It’s for your family. It’s for us. It’s for you._

Luckily, it involves far less kicking and screaming as time goes on. Adam still hates Hebrew school, and he hates most of his classmates, but his teachers are nice enough and the years pass easily. He learns that Hanukkah actually _isn’t_ the most important holiday (despite the presents), that it’s a totally different year on the Jewish calendar altogether, and that the menorah-shaped Hanukkah cookies from their local (non-Jewish) bakery kind of suck. He also eventually becomes absolutely fucking adamant that sour cream is better than apple sauce, which becomes the biggest rift in the Milligan household because Kate’s an apple sauce defendant through and through.

He learns how to read Hebrew – _with_ vowels – and learns how to properly pin his yarmulke in his hair so it stops sliding off his head whenever he so much as breathes. He and Kate go to Shabbat services at least once a month – never more than that, because the closest Reform synagogue (and the location of the Hebrew school itself) is two hours away, and they barely make it before the doors close every time. 

\---

When he’s twelve, he meets John Winchester for the first time. 

The man is as kind as can be but definitely out of his element, and they spend that first day eating ice cream at the diner together bouncing between Adam’s curious questions and John’s preference for silence. It’s clear that John has no idea what to do with Adam’s inquisitiveness and energy, and Adam likewise has no idea what to do with a man who’s supposed to be his dad but acts like he barely knows what day it is. 

Then again, this is new territory for both of them. The discomfort can be excused. 

When John leaves at the end of the day, Kate does the diplomatic thing and asks Adam if he’d like to invite his father – _father,_ a weird word – to his upcoming bar mitzvah. Adam declines and pretends not to notice Kate’s sigh of relief.

\---

Time passes.

With a week to go until his bar mitzvah, Adam will never admit it, but he’s kind of excited. Kind of proud. He’d worked hard and put up with a lot of annoyances (again, mostly in the form of his classmates), but he finally made it. 

Kate gifts him a gorgeous silver Star of David necklace for the occasion, and Adam learns that if he wants to wear it in public, it’s better for him to hide it under his shirt. 

He briefly considers continuing on with his studies to confirmation, when he’ll be sixteen. 

But the realities of life begin to settle in. After middle school comes high school, and high school comes with its own baggage. It comes, almost immediately, with the impending shadow of college, and Adam knows he’ll have to make some sacrifices along the way if he wants to go to medical school. 

Sacrifice doesn’t scare him. It’s in his bones. 

But it’s still a sad thing when he has to drop out of his confirmation classes because they interfere with track and field practice on weekends (all part of crafting that ‘well-rounded’ high school education for college applications). 

And, well, he didn’t _just_ join track for college. He likes it. He’s good at it. He even starts making new friends on the team, friends who he wouldn’t have met otherwise because they don’t share the same classes, or they aren’t in the same grade. 

And so, as the months go on, he doesn’t consider it a sacrifice anymore, to drop out of confirmation. It was a simple decision. He can always go back to it later.

But later never arrives. 

Sophomore year _does_ arrive, of course, and then junior year. The pages of the calendar fall off like leaves, and before he knows it Adam is working on his college essay for the University of Wisconsin. He answers the essay question as best he can (“Discuss an accomplishment, event, or realization that sparked a period of personal growth and a new understanding of yourself or others”) and submits it early, hoping against hope that he’ll have an answer soon so he won’t have to think about it anymore. 

John, meanwhile, has continued to pop in and out of his life, but the man clearly stuck to one script and has only ever appeared for Adam’s birthdays to take him to a baseball game. It’s almost a nonevent. 

Sometimes, in rare moments of desperation, Adam wants to ask John if he’s Jewish too. He just wants one connection, one _thing_ that they could share together besides DNA, but he never grows the courage to ask. 

Adam doesn’t think about confirmation again, and he doesn’t go to Shabbat services anymore.

The Star of David necklace sits in a drawer in his room. 

He’s accepted at UW-Madison as a biology major on a pre-med track, and it’s a whirlwind from there, because it seems that right after he gets to college, he has to turn right around and head back home: his mother has gone missing.

He doesn’t find her. What he _does_ find are the _things_ that killed her – that _ate_ her – and no amount of religious school and Torah practice can prepare Adam for the moment when they eat and kill him too – in that order.

\---

He’s dead, then. He goes to Heaven ( _wait until Rabbi Feit hears about this_ ) and stays within the confines of his high school prom – or at least the memory of it. 

It’s not so bad. It could be worse.

But then, but _then—_

The sequence of events is a whirlwind, like being caught in a cyclone and never being able to touch the ground or get your bearings. Adam meets Zachariah and the world shifts out from under him one more time; he’s pulled from the dirt and meets his _brothers_ and—

And there’s another moment, sitting down at the table with Sam Winchester, where Adam wants to ask The Question, the one he’d wanted to ask John eons ago. 

He didn’t ask then, so he doesn’t ask now. 

Eventually Zachariah betrays him and Adam briefly wonders what his rabbi would think of him if he were to punch an angel of the lord in the face.

And then, and then, and then—

He meets Michael.

Michael, _the_ archangel, who fills him with light. Adam is overflowing with it, enveloped in it, and it’s hard – it’s _so_ hard – to remember where he is, even if he’s within his own head. It’s hard to be a person and yet not _be._

He shocks himself by reciting the Shema for the first time in years to calm himself down when he’s afraid of being lost in the light. 

He’s shocked again when Michael, who has clearly heard the prayer, pulses with something that – in the middle of all the betrayal and anger and righteousness – feels almost like delight. 

\---

Adam is forced into the recesses of his mind and wrapped in Michael’s light as he watches everything that happens at Stull Cemetery. 

When they all fall into the Cage together – him, Michael, Sam, and Lucifer – he wonders briefly if what’s about to follow is better than dying.

\---

When Adam regains his consciousness in the Cage, the first thing he does is search himself – search his _being_ – for Michael, who reassures Adam of his presence with a very cheeky, very purposeful _Here I am_ that makes Adam want to smile despite everything. 

And then hours or days or weeks later, when his smile has long faded, the fear and panic set in.

Adam tries to find something soothing to latch onto and, out of fear of the unknown and desperation for the familiar, recites the Mourner’s Kaddish as they sit in the Cage. Other than the Shema, it’s one of the only other prayers he knows from memory (the other, for some inexplicable reason, is the Avot). 

When he hears the Kaddish, Michael is _furious._

_We are **not** dying here. Don’t you dare. _

Adam doesn’t recite it again.

He doesn’t know how much time passes in the Cage. Michael does his best to shield and distract him from the realities of what’s happening around them. Adam does his best to distract Michael in turn by telling him stories about himself: _So, I got suspended from school once because I hit the class bully in the head with a textbook…_

Michael listens, and learns, and remembers. It’s nice, Adam thinks, to be heard and seen. For both of them.

Adam still doesn’t know how much time is passing. He briefly wishes he still had the necklace his mom had given him, just as a small comfort. Something to cling to. Something to remember. He wishes, back when he was alive, that he’d been brave enough to wear it on top of his clothing – or brave enough to wear it at all. 

Michael senses his regret and soothes him, all soft light and gentle grace.

Adam’s own eternal flame.

\---

And then, and then, and then—

The Cage opens.

And Adam wants food. 

The flame inside him pulses with delight and obliges.

\---

Adam, through no actual desire of his own, is eventually reunited with the Winchesters again, and he finds himself laughing internally at how ironic it is that they’re fighting God Himself. 

His rabbi would find it hilarious, too.

Adam wonders, now that they’re free, if there’s a chance his necklace is still in its drawer, if his house is still even there, untouched. A memorial to the ones who used to live there. 

When they leave the bunker, Michael answers that question for him and takes him there. 

He gives Adam the reins over his own body and lets him put the necklace on. It sits around his neck awkwardly, like it doesn’t belong; Adam hasn’t worn it in years. 

He tucks it under his shirt collar, an old reflex. He’s not brave enough to wear it in the open yet – but maybe one day, he will be.

Michael asks him where he’d like to go next. 

Adam smiles and says to surprise him.

\---

Of course it couldn’t last.

It never does.

Michael may be an eternal flame, but Adam is made of dust and dirt.

Adam barely has time to crack one last joke and make Michael smile before he feels himself slipping away from the warm light and into the dark.

\---

When Adam comes to, he’s in his own body again – and he’s alone in his own head for the first time in centuries. 

He doesn’t know what’s happened since he was gone, and there’s no one – no flame, no voice, no _Michael_ – that he can ask. He’s half a person now. Half a soul. He feels it, like he’s been ripped in half, like his chest has caved in, like, like, like—

He mentally recites the Mourner’s Kaddish for the first time in years (in centuries), hoping against hope that he’ll coax Michael out of his hiding place through the sheer force of the archangel’s outrage. _We are **not** dying here. Don’t you dare. _

But Michael doesn’t come, and Adam finishes the Kaddish in its entirety. 

He is half a body and half a soul and he wonders if maybe being dust and dirt was better than this.

Adam knows the mourning period is meant to be a year, but a single year when weighed against a thousand is so trivial it’s almost meaningless.

_I loved you for centuries. I can mourn you for centuries, too._

He recites – sings – the Mourner’s Kaddish out loud now, not in an effort to reach Michael, but as acceptance of reality. The words spill from him like water, and Adam knows that even as he ages, even when he’s old and gray, he will never forget the words to this prayer.

_Yitgadal v’yitkadash sh’mei raba..._

And as the melody carries out to the wind, Adam thinks back to his great-grandfather, to Eliezer Milechmann. Adam had always thought Eliezer must’ve been absurdly brave to do what he did, but as Adam got older, he started to wonder how much of that courage was masking the terror underneath. Eliezer had lost a piece of himself when he came to this country and changed his name in the hopes of being welcomed and accepted. He’d lost a piece of himself when he left his home and his family, dreaming that there must be something better across the sea. 

Adam had always wondered what that must have felt like. To lose something so vital, so important, so crucial to who you are. 

_This,_ Adam thinks now, feeling his hollow chest, his quiet head, his halved heart. _It probably felt like this._

  
  
  
  
  


And then, and then, and _then—_

  
  
  
  
  


There’s no warning when the empty spaces between Adam’s bones are filled with warm light once again.

It feels like being embraced by the sun. It feels like coming home. 

The eternal flame greets him with three simple words that make Adam laugh and cry in equal measure:

_Here I am._

**Author's Note:**

> So from this point on, Adam Milligan is Jewish in all my fics. He’s also retroactively Jewish in my old fics, because I’m the writer and I say so. Literally try and stop me. 
> 
> Also, sour cream > applesauce and you can fight me in the comments or over on [Tumblr](http://buckybarnz.tumblr.com).


End file.
